Row 2k for time

Congrats to Antonio Key for winning week 7 of our Newtrition Challenge! Only one more week to go, read below for details…

Unbelievable but true, it has been almost 8 weeks since our Nutrition and Health Symposium and the kick off of our Newtrition Challenge. The points will stop being scored officially on Sunday, December 11th, and you will have until the following Friday, December 16th to retest your workout scores. This is what its all about! Plan carefully for the days you will be performing the workouts so you can see your best possible improvements! A few reminders:

-A judge is required for “Cindy” to watch standards and count reps.-Use the same standards and assistance for the re-test. Even if you are strong enough to do a harder variation, we want an accurate measurement of your improvement.-Even if you did not keep score on the Forum, but paid the entry fee, you are still eligible to win the most improved award-You may perform the workouts on any given day from now until next Friday as long as you are not impeding upon the regular class.-There will still be an individual points winner for the 8th week, so work hard until the end!

Good luck and keep it up!

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In other exciting news, I am now CrossFit Kids Certified! This was an absolutely amazing weekend seminar and another step towards making the world a better place! The instructors that led the seminar were so fired up about what they were doing and for good reason! We have not yet figured out how to work a Kids program into our system, but let me tell you a few things I learned that make this program so exciting.

We hear it all the time, “I wish I was doing this when I was a kid!” In other words, people wonder how badass they would be if they had been CrossFitting their whole lives. At the certification, they rephrased this to say that we have yet to discover the extent of our genetic potential. This sounds like something you may have heard before, but they gave this amazing story about a girl named Tori Allen. This 14 yearl old girl came out of no where to win Gold at the 2002 X-games in the speed climbing event. No one could understand how a girl so young could perform so well. She had a secret weapon…and no, it wasn’t CrossFit! When she was 4 years old, she moved to Africa with her parents to do missionary work in rural areas and ended up becoming best friends with a monkey! She spent all of her time climbing with her monkey friend and guess what happened. Her fingers became longer, with the tendons and ligaments of her joints larger and stronger. She can do one fingered pullups. Her ‘ape index’ which is the length of your armspan versus the height of your body (they should be relatively similar), is abnormally high. The interesting thing about these features are that neither of her parents exhibit any of these characteristics! Watch a video of Tori Allen here (start around 4:30).

We all know how important and empowering it is to be healthy and fit, yet we also know that the top two leading diseases affecting children in this country are obesity and Type 2 Diabetes. Both of which are completely preventable! A typical day for a child may be something like this: waking up and eating a breakfast of mostly processed carbs while watching TV, sitting on a bus on the way to school, then sitting in a chair for 7 hours because PE is now optional, eating a lunch of mostly processed carbs, arriving home on the bus and watching tv or playing video games for a few hours before eating a dinner of mostly processed carbs and then going to bed. Think about those two concepts of: what is possible for a child if given the opportunity (Tori Allen) and what reality is currently offering (obesity). This is no ones fault, but we know we can change this reality. For those that are curious how a CrossFit program would work for kids, I would love to discuss with you, but they started off with a very specific message:

CrossFit Kids is not merely a scaled down version of CrossFit. It is entirely and absolutely CrossFit, geared and designed for a special population and the specific developmental needs of that population.

Another funny story from the head trainer Todd: He was discussing how he brings his little guys along to the gym when he works out, he calls them Dude and Dude’s little brother. So one day Dude is hanging out with one of his gym buddies, they’re both about 4 years old. Todd is doing some heavy snatch work and keeping an eye on the kids. He sees them start to pull some equipment out: a couple jump ropes, a little kids play Yoke, an abmat, etc. All of a sudden the kids yell, “3,2,1, Go!” and they start running around, whipping the jump rope around, doing some form of sit ups, until Dude yells, “TIME!” and they immediately both fall to the floor and start flailing about, rolling around, moaning like they just finished a horrible workout. Then they did it again. Can you envision this scene? You know how some of our friends and family find us strange? We work out so hard that we can’t think for an hour afterwards. We look at our food as protein, carbs and fat. We think about what we eat and how it will affect our performance. For these kids though, this will be their normal life!